From cold rooms to a cross-border food business

My father drove an ice lorry. Through the 1980s he delivered blocks of ice to coffee shops and market stalls around Geylang and Paya Lebar, before most of them owned a reliable freezer, and in the school holidays I rode beside him and watched the blocks shrink while stallholders argued about the weight. I still think about that lorry whenever someone shows me a cold-chain plan that assumes the journey takes as long as the map says.

I finished national service in 1995 and read mechanical engineering at Seloka University, graduating in 1999. My first employer, Polarstead Refrigeration Engineering, designed and installed cold rooms for supermarkets and central kitchens. In 2000 a freezer room I had commissioned at a neighbourhood supermarket failed on a Sunday afternoon. Its condensing unit had been sized for an ambient temperature of 32°C. On the roof where the landlord had placed it, the air around the unit was above 40°C. The supermarket lost a weekend's frozen stock, and I lost my faith in design conditions copied from a brochure.

In 2002 I moved to Teraju Flour Mills in Jurong as a process engineer, because I wanted to run equipment rather than install it and leave. A flour mill is a quiet education in throughput and in danger, since the fine dust that makes flour easy to convey can also ignite. I became a shift production manager in 2004 and learnt to lead people who worked nights, many of them on work permits, and whose knowledge of the rollers and sifters was better than mine.

From 2005 I ran production, and then the whole plant, at Kayu Manis Frozen Foods, a family-owned maker of frozen dumplings, buns and dim sum in Woodlands. There I first carried responsibility for food safety rather than equipment: a hazard-analysis system built from scratch, an export customer's audit failed and then passed, and a recall of one batch that taught me how quickly a small labelling error becomes a public matter. I completed a part-time master's degree in supply chain management in the evenings, finishing in 2007.

In 2010 I crossed the Causeway to become head of operations at Simpang Mart, a Malaysian convenience-store chain with 410 stores, 270 of them franchised. Franchising changed how I think about a store. A franchisee is a small business owner who has borrowed money against our forecast, and when we added a product, extended trading hours or changed a delivery day, we were spending part of that person's savings. I learnt to ask what a decision did to the franchisee's monthly cash before asking what it did to our margin.

Rumbia hired me in September 2014 to rebuild its production. The group then made its products in three ageing kitchens, two in Singapore and one in Shah Alam. I designed and opened a single central kitchen at Senai in 2016, which cut unit production costs by 19 per cent and gave us room to grow into Malaysia. I became chief operating officer in April 2019. Within a year the pandemic closed our food halls, shut the border for months and put our migrant workers in crowded hostels. Those months showed me how much of our operating model depended on people and journeys we had never examined closely.

The decisions I am best known for inside the industry came from that period. We repaid recruitment fees our workers should never have carried. We built a chilled kitchen in Singapore after a festive-weekend jam at the border cost us a lorry-load of cream cakes and the customers who wanted them. We stopped pretending that a delivered breakfast was the same product as one eaten at a table. Each choice cost money in the year we made it, and each was opposed by capable colleagues whose objections were reasonable.

I lead about 6,900 people through nine direct reports. Once a month I walk a kitchen floor during the four o'clock production run, because that is when shortcuts happen. I ask managers to describe a problem by time, place and temperature before they offer a cause, and I would rather hear about a near-miss on the day than a clean audit at the end of the quarter. Our head of food safety reports to me but can take any concern straight to the chair of the Audit and Risk Committee, an arrangement I proposed and value.

Outside Rumbia I sit on the board of Lantern Table, a small food-rescue charity, where I chair its operations committee. I am now preparing for a second kind of responsibility: one independent directorship at a listed company outside food, where my job would be to ask the operating questions that I have spent twenty-seven years learning to answer.

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